The bistable flip-flop 60 years on
flip-flop from 'Electronic Computers' - T.E. Ivall About 60 years ago I started to teach myself about how digital computers worked. I'd already written some simple programs and I wanted to build a computer of my own. In 1960 that was a bit ambitious, but I did manage to build a few simple digital circuits including a flop-flop . (A few years later I hand-wired a core store, but that's another story). The flip-flop lies at the heart of digital electronics.The thing that makes digital computers so powerful is memory. Memory can store the data that programs work on, and it can also store the the programs themselves. Early computers used a variety of techniques for storage but almost all of them used flip-flops to some extent. The bistable flip-flop is a very simple circuit. It can store a single binary digit (bit) of information. The flip-flop was not new in 1960. The original patent was granted to the inventors (Eccles and Jordan) in 1918. That was long befo...